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Monday, July 26, 2010

Silly Monkey Stories #108 - Snake

(En español más abajo)

Year 1945 – Rubén and Enrique (8)

I'm going to place this story, almost arbitrarily, in 1945; this is due to the fact that my father told me he was about eight years old when it happened, and since he was born in 1937... I will also take advantage of the fact that I'm talking about my Dad (and my uncle) to link this post to yesterday's, which was also dedicated to them.

My Dad and my uncle Enrique were very mischievous kids; I have already mentioned how they would run away after they had done something bad and climb up a tree, staying at the top for the rest of the day, as if they were hoping that my grandparents would forget about the whole thing. They would eventually come down, tired and hungry, and dinner would be surprisingly uneventful. Now once they were in bed and unable to run away... my grandfather Guillermo would show up, with his 'alpargata' (a typical Argentine sandal) in hand! They would not be able to sit for a while after those encounters... :-)

The deadly ‘Alpargatas’ – Las mortíferas ‘Alpargatas’

My grandmother René was a lovely woman. She got married very young (15), as it was customary in the rural areas back then, and soon she became the mother of twins. She had a very difficult life, dealing with a diabetes that caused her to become blind while still to young and eventually to die, at only 62 years of age. It would have been her ninetieth birthday yesterday...

Grandma René, as I was saying, was a very nice lady, but she would get very nervous whenever the kids were making her the butt of their jokes and pranks. She would run after them and once she found them atop the eucalyptus tree, she would threaten them in a very funny way:

- You're going to fall off the tree and get killed!!! AND THEN I'm going to beat you both up with my alpargatas!!! :-)

My paternal and maternal grandparents weren't that much in touch anymore when I was a kid, because my parents were divorced already, but both my grandmothers shared something: fear for all kinds of creepy creatures. More than once, we had hid a plastic spider in my grandma Haydeé's bed or hang it from the roof, always with the same result: my grandmother always passing out and us in big trouble. A few years later I found out that we hadn't been original at all: my father and my uncle had done way worse things 30, 35 years before...

Some day, while walking around, the twins had found a dead little snake. It was probably a harmless garden snake, because there aren't too many poisonous snakes in the area where I used to live. They picked the corpse up very carefully and took it back home, wondering what they could do with it.

They had the answer to their questions the moment they got back, as they found my grandma washing the dishes in the kitchen. She was standing right in front of a window, under which both juvenile delinquents positioned themselves. With a lot of patient, and armed with a large twig, they turned the poor snake into a puppet and started to make it go up by the wall, very slowly (as if they were imitating the moves of a real snake -- and snakes that small could climb up a 5 foot wall!).

Still hidden underneath the window, they kept raising the poor ophidian until a very loud scream gave them the information they needed: they had reached the necessary altitude for my grandmother to see it.

After that, the usual: the screaming, the chasing, the tree climbing, the long stay and the climbing down at dinner time.